Currency and Accounts

TravellingWave
Contributor
Contributor

Dear Forum,
I am one of those unfortunate souls that haven't lived my whole life in one place, and also frequently need to buy internationally. I am therefore frequently exposed to the complications we that happens with international payments.

  1. When I am trying to pay for a completed transaction on eBay UK with my PayPal account, my debit card (confirmed debit card) is charged in whatever PayPal feels like, (apparently EUR) and not GBP. I can't for my life figure out how to get charged in the sellers currency. It's a multi currency debit card, so there is always GBP on it. I just lost 10GBP in PayPal fees because they insert their own currency exchange into the process. PayPal appear to charge 4-5% above the market rate, which is a lot of money. Not only that, but I now need to change from GBP to EUR to backfill the EUR they took.

  2. I have been trying to add my UK debit card (from a UK bank) to my account for a couple of weeks, but PayPal keeps refusing this for a couple of weeks, and I can't seem to get a coherent response or explanation why. It works fine to use for everything else I pay for in the UK, but not with eBay/PayPal. Does PayPal has some kind of rule that you cannot add a debit card from more than one currency? My bank has not seen any attempts to charge the card.

  3. I have several bank accounts that I have added direct debit mandate for. The first one was a EUR account which was easy to confirm. I also have a couple of GBP accounts. However, when trying to confirm the GBP accounts PayPal insists on sending the confirmation payment in EUR. And obviously it gets converted to GBP as soon as it hits the account, so the confirmation payment will of course not match. Are PayPal completely unable to handle bank accounts in more than one currency? Do I need to have one PayPal account for each currency? (Running out of email accounts)

  4. My last problem is a strange problem with paying. I did a buy-it-now purchase and asked to pay with PayPal. I had a confirmed debit card on the account with plenty of funds. However, PayPal just kept asking me to "add a card". So I kept adding the same card and different card, and the payment was never declined, it just kept asking me to "add a card". I already had a confirmed debit card on the account! Why would it do that?

In hindsight I am glad I didn't use PayPal for this large purchase because then I would have lost about 5% in their EUR conversion fee. I ended up buying it from the seller outside of eBay, I was charged in the correct currency, the seller saved on eBay fees and everybody was happy.

  • I apologize for raising questions like this on the forum, but the PayPal customer support seems completely incoherent, if you can get hold of someone else than a bot they really never answer the question.
  • Incredulously they shut down their phone support in an era where people have nothing better to do than talking on the phone...
  • I am about to give up on PayPal because it's been so incredibly difficult, but of course it's the BayPal monopoly....
  • Fortunately I am increasingly able to move more of the transactions outside of eBay and PayPal to avoid the trouble, but I would like to be able to purchase reliably on eBay and pay in the correct currency.

 

 

 

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TravellingWave
Contributor
Contributor

One update/workaround.

I just checked out from eBay and chose not to pay with PayPal.  Instead I chose to pay with debit/card, then typed in the same card that was confirmed on my PayPal account. Then I was presented with a charge in EUR, but with the difference I could change this to be charged in GBP. And incredibly the payment went through (so far). It's the first successful transaction I have had on eBay for weeks. Hooray! It's of course a pain in the butt to have to type in my already registered debit card information over again to be able to charge in the sellers currency. And I am not sure I will benefit from the fact that the card is confirmed like I would if I paid through PayPal. (I'll bet a beer they will reject it for any large payment.) But then at least I am making baby steps towards being able to pay in the correct currency. 

 

 

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